SmartFilter's Greatest Evils

Seth Finkelstein has taken a look at what gets blocked by censorware in the most categories. What would you think there is on the web that qualifies as sex, drugs, crime, gambling, sports, news, religion, art, travel, hate, gross and fun and games? Oh, and some of these sites are useful in research too. Give up?

Already There

We've already seen most of this. If not in the direct effects of libraries having censorware, we have history to testify to the silencing of geniuses. The difference between that and censorware is that censorware is more effective. R and X ratings don't keep people from watching those movies, and the Acadamy doesn't even pay attention.

The only real difference I see is that the effectiveness of censorware could keep those in power from silencing muckrakers who would expose them. The social effects of censorship have already been witnessed.

The reasoning is quite simple...

The blocked anonymization and translation services mentioned in the paper are blocked by the service because they can both be used to bypass the URL-based filtering scheme.

If you're running a filtering service, you don't really have any choice if you want to have any sort of efficacy.

And, of course, that's precisely why filters cost more than their benefits. It would have been nice had the author addressed that angle, rather than writing a propaganda piece that does little more than thinly alluding to some sort of censorship conspiracy.

Cached sites

What about cached sites? You could just do a Gogle search and open the cached page instead. Oops, did I just give them more to filter?

Who decides this anyway?
In a dank basement double-cubicle somewhere in Gotham:

"Freshmeat.org?"
"Definately sounds like porn. Probably kiddie stuff..."
"Ok. Let's check it out" [drool]
"Heh, it's our job!"[click, click, click]
"Ugh, how disappointing..."
"Disgusting."
"Filter?"
"Definately. Under self-help. Occult and militant, too."
"I'll do porn for good measure."
"Um...no. That file doubles as our "Adult Site Finder" for the guys upstairs."
"Oh, yeah..."

I am wondering...

Does it also filter first posts?

Smartfilter user's view

This isn't really about censoring anyone, it's about controlling a network resource IMHO. We use Smartfilter at a site with about 4000 users and after a few grumbling at the start, we barely get 1 request for an exemption to a blocked site per week. Generally Secure Computing does a decent job of keeping their list updated. I would say if you stick to a short list of categories to block (I think our main ones are sex, drugs, criminal skills (have to exempt securityfocus.com and 2600.com though! ;-), gambling, and a couple of others) you shouldn't have much trouble. Again, this isn't about censorship is general, it's about controlling the network resource for business reasons. After adding the filters the amount of superfluous porn browsing dropped by over 95%. Like it or not, it WAS eating up a lot of our bandwidth. Call it poor management, call it dumb users, call it whatever you want, but there's no reason workers should be sitting browsing porn while on the job.

Now, as for the anonymizer sites and the proxies, I don't think there is anything that can be done about them. Their main purpose it to be setup to bypass "censorware" so they must be blocked. It's a losing battle of course.. kind of like playing whack-a-mole. Once you kill one another pops up right away. I'm sure there are thousands out there that people have just setup that aren't on the list. You just have to take decent precautions against flagrant abuse and hope the rest of the people aren't abusing your resources. The only other way to fix it is to have strenuous reviewing of the logs, authenticating to the proxy for tracking purposes, etc. We don't have the time to do #1 and the users would scream bloody murder if we did #2.

Re:Smartfilter user's view

After adding the filters the amount of superfluous porn browsing dropped by over 95%.

Yes, but the important question is, did it adversely affect the amount of relevant, necessary porn browsing? <g>

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Re:Smartfilter user's view

Maybe their bosses could just see if porn-surfing is keeping them from getting their jobs done.

At my school, they have a pretty enlightened attitude. If a student is looking at porn in the library on a computer, a librarian walks over and says, "Excuse me, but that's against the rules."

What's wrong with using a little common sense, and not getting freaked out about it if some porn-surfing slips through the cracks? I don't think anyone imagines that everything done on the net at a school, library, or business is related to the purpose of the institution. There's also water cooler gossip, etc., which doesn't seem to bring most businesses to their knees. Americans just have a hysterical reaction to porn. It has very little to do with efficiency.

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Re:Censorware isn't effective

Take your MPAA example, which you misstate. R and X ratings are quite effective, and the MPAA very much does pay attention, but not for the purpose of deterring people (even minors) from seeing violence or sex in theaters. R and X ratings encourage viewership, since they assure hormonally empowered youths to see a movie which they might otherwise pass by.

You're correct in stating that production houses pay very strict attention to the rating they're hoping to find for their audience, but then you vastly oversimplify the matter by saying that X ratings encourage viewership. X ratings encourage viewership for an extremely limited audience, and in extremely limited venues, but no big-budget film will shoot for this rating because there's not enough of a return on the investment.

For example, when the MPAA saw the original cut of Eddie Murphy Raw [imdb.com], they stamped an X rating on it, which caused Murphy and Townshend to scramble back to the editing room trying to cut out some of the more "offensive" bits. Townshend claimed to be shocked at the original rating, considering that there's no violence or nudity in the piece (just a lot of cursing).

And, because I sense a value judgement in your tone that sets my teeth on edge: the majority of the people I know who use pornography (and tell me about it) are married and above the age of thirty, and some people go into the sex industry because they actually enjoy it.

Finally, I suspect that your general point about the censored web site becoming more attractive to the surfer is just wrong, for two reasons. First reason: it's so damn easy to find porn on the Internet. Very rarely will someone care whether one site or another is censored, just so long as he can get to any of them, since the average web surfer has the attention span of a junebug and similar site loyalty. It might make the surfer more likely to seek out pornography in general - if he's, say, twelve - but otherwise, it's just yet another site that NetNanny (or whatever) blocks. The second reason: censorware tends to block so many sites incorrectly (false positives) that few people will pay attention to yet another blocked page.